Holidays loom
August 16th, 2007Just a quick note to say that I am about to go off on my holidays, returning in early September. I expect all the leaves to have fallen off the trees by the time I return, bearing in mind the premature onset of autumn that seems to have hit us. I was visiting a resident in Lawn yesterday and noted that his eating apples were ready to fall off the trees. This ninety-two year old gentleman still grows his own fruit and vegetables, and is ready to offer some pithy observations about the way of the world.
He is fed up with platitudinous politicians who seem more interested in their salaries and pensions than in prompting genuine debate. I hope that I can prove to him that politics doesn’t have to be like that…
As I prepare to leave, a welcome and interesting report from the Party Policy Group co-chaired by John Redwood and Simon Wolfson. The notion that Inheritance Tax purely hits the rich has been gradually and surreptitiously made a nonsense by Gordon Brown. With average house prices now topping £180,000, it is easy to see that IHT is now a real problem for families who cannot by any measure be regarded as rich.
We will not take lectures from a Prime Minister whose last act as Chancellor was to penalise lower income families with a tax con, and whose tax credits system is a national disgrace. New Labour destroyed the left/right axis in British politics, so it is foolish for them to make allegations about “lurches to the right” when firstly, this is a consultation document and secondly, Labour tries to bend over backwards to please the Daily Mail.
Simon Wolfson is Chairman of Next. He is my age, which makes me feel rather inadequate. I console myself with the thought that, twenty years ago, I was one of a duo from Durham which beat his Cambridge team to win the Inner Temple Intervarsity Debating Competition. How time flies.
